Tag Archives: camping

Camping!

Updated on July 30, 2011 by Elena Greene

This weekend I’m taking the kids to Salt Springs State Park for a church group camping weekend. Hopefully we will have good weather, but if it’s hot we can always wallow in the creek.

My family used to go camping every summer, usually in Canada, so we have a lot of camping anecdotes. My favorite is when my brother and I went out to play and brought a pair of baby black bear cubs back to camp. We were very young at the time, as were the cubs. They returned to their mother when she showed up and the family just left. Black bears aren’t typically dangerous but we were still fortunate that this mother didn’t become aggressive.

I’ve never read of anybody camping in the Regency for fun. The Regency characters we read about that might have camped are our Napoleonic War veterans. Here’s a picture from The Wheatley Diary. The caption says “two blankets thrown over a stick was our house.”
At some point they had better tents, but they still weren’t nearly as good as the ones we use today.

Here’s an account of the conditions from “Adventures in the Rifle Brigade” by John Kincaid.

“Encamped on the face of La Rhune, we remained a whole month idle spectators of their (the enemy’s) preparations, and dearly longing for the day that should afford us an opportunity of penetrating into the more hospitable-looking low country beyond them; for the weather had become excessively cold, and our camp stood exposed to the utmost fury of the almost nightly tempest. Oft have I, in the middle of the night, awoke from a sound sleep, and found my tent on the point of disappearing into the air, like a balloon, and, leaving my warm blankets, been obliged to snatch the mallet, and rush out in the midst of a hail-storm, to peg it down. I think that I now see myself looking like one of those gay creatures of the elements who dwell (as Shakespeare has it) among the rainbows!

By way of contributing to the warmth of my tent, I dug a hole inside, which I arranged as a fireplace, carrying the smoke underneath the walls, and building a turf chimney outside. I was not long in proving the experiment, and, finding that it went exceedingly wekk, I was not a little vain of the invention. However, it came on to rain very hard while I was dining at a neighboring tent, and on my return to my own, I found the fire not only extinguished, but a fountain playing from the same place, up to the roof, watering my bed and baggage, and all sides of it, most refreshingly.”

Hopefully we will have a more comfortable time of it this weekend.

Do you enjoy camping? What is your most interesting camping anecdote?

Elena

Posted in Jane Austen | Tagged Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, camping, Jane Austen, John Kincaid, The Wheatley Diary | 9 Replies

Roughing it

Updated on January 30, 2008 by Elena Greene

Right now I’m deep in researching the details of my army brat hero’s background and one of my absolute favorite references is Life in Wellington’s Army by Antony Brett-James. It’s just full of the sort of detail that is missed in most history books, much of it gathered from journals and letters of soldiers and officers.

Life in Wellington’s army was no picnic. Read on if you are not too faint of heart…or stomach.

Consider this letter from Charles Napier to his mother: “We are on biscuits full of maggots, and though not a bad soldier, hang me if I can relish maggots.”

Or the story of biscuits (of American make) that were so hard and thick that Lieutenant Wyndham Madden of the 43rd Light Infantry suggested they could turn a bullet aside as he put one in his jacket. “Never was prediction more completely verified,” a fellow officer wrote, “for early in the day the biscuit was shattered to pieces, turning the direction of the bullet from as gallant and true a heart as ever beat under a British uniform.”

(The illustration is “Half Rations” from The Military Adventures of Johnny Newcombe by Rowlandson.)

As for living conditions, when they were not billeted in some village or other, the men often had to sleep in the open. Sometimes they used makeshift tents. In 1813 tents were made general issue but were only a marginal improvement. With twenty soldiers to one tent, it meant, according to Sergeant Cooper, that “none could turn without general consent, and the word ‘turn’ given.” Moreover, in the wintry conditions in the Pyrenees, “mountain gusts and drenching rain tore the wooden pegs out of the mud and left the soldiers to flounder in horrible, enveloping wet folds of canvas.” Brrrr!

(Sketch from The Wheatley Diary.)

I was raised doing all sorts of camping, spending weeks with my family hiking in the Adirondacks or canoeing in the Canadian wilderness. At least we had modern, reasonably waterproof tents. And of course, no maggot-ridden biscuits–although I learned to love Spam while camping. I don’t know how it is—I’ve since tried it at home and found it disgusting!—but frying it over an open fire makes it crispy, salty and delicious beyond words.

Much as I cherish the memory of those family camping trips, now I am married to a man whose idea of roughing it is staying at Day’s Inn rather than Marriott. I still like to hike and canoe, but now our “camping” involves something more like this. Even I have to admit there’s something to be said for modern plumbing!